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After Auschwitz
From the moment of its inception, the East German state sought to cast itself as a clean break from the horrors of National Socialism. Nonetheless, the precipitous rise of xenophobic, far-right parties across the present-day German East is only the latest evidence that the GDR’s legacy cannot be understood in isolation from the Nazi era nor the political upheavals of today. This provocative collection reflects on the heretofore ignored or repressed aspects of German mainstream society—including right-wing extremism, anti-Semitism and racism—to call for an ambitious renewal of historical research and political education to place East Germany in its proper historical context.
Rereading East Germany
This volume is the first to address the culture of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a historical entity, but also to trace the afterlife of East Germany in the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. An international team of outstanding scholars offers essential and thought-provoking essays, combining a chronological and genre-based overview from the beginning of the GDR in 1949 to the unification in 1990 and beyond, with in-depth analysis of individual works. A final chapter traces the resonance of the GDR in the years since its demise and analyses the fascination it engenders. The volume provides a 'rereading' of East Germany and its legacy as a cultural phenomenon free from the prejudices that prevailed while it existed, offering English translations throughout, a guide to further reading and a chronology.
Revolting Families
Revolting Families places the literary depiction of familial and intimate relations in 1960s West Germany against the backdrop of public discourse on the political significance of the private sphere. Carrie Smith-Prei focuses on debut works by German authors considered to be part of the “new” and “black” realism movements: Dieter Wellershoff, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Gisela Elsner, and Renate Rasp. Each of the works by these authors uses depictions of neurosis, disgust, vertigo, or violence to elicit a reaction in readers that calls them to political, social, or ethical action. Revolting Families thus extends the concept of negativity, which has long been part of post-war German philosophical and aesthetic theory, to the body in German literature and culture. Through an analysis of these texts and of contextual discourse, Smith-Prei develops a theoretical concept of corporeal negativity that works to provoke socio-political engagement with the private sphere.
Modern Austrian Literature through the Lens of Adaptation
For decades postwar Austrian literature has been measured against and moulded into a series of generic categories and grand cultural narratives, from nostalgic ‘restoration’ literature of the 1950s through the socially critical ‘anti-Heimat’ novel to recent literary reckonings with Austria’s Nazi past. Peering through the lens of film adaptation, this book rattles the generic shackles imposed by literary history and provides an entirely new critical perspective on Austrian literature. Its original methodological approach challenges the primacy of written sources in existing scholarship and uses the distortions generated by the shift in medium as a productive starting point for lite...
Bertolt Brecht
The publication of this volume of essays marks the centenary of the birth of Bertolt Brecht on 10 February 1898. The essays were commissioned from scholars and critics around the world, and cover six main areas: recent biographical controversies; neglected theoretical writings; the semiotics of Brechtian theatre; new readings of classic texts; Brecht's role and reception in the GDR; and contemporary appropriations of Brecht's work. This volume will be essential reading for all those interested in twentieth century theatre, modern German studies, and the contemporary reassessment of post-war culture in the wake of German unification and the collapse of Stalinist communism in Central and Eastern Europe. The essays in this volume also address a variety of general questions, concerning - for example - authorship and textuality; the nature of Brecht's Marxism in relation to his understanding of modernity, science and Enlightenment reason; Marxist aesthetics; radical cultural politics; and feminist performance theory.
Schaltstelle
Erstmals liegt mit Schaltstelle eine umfassende Studie zur zeitgenössischen deutschsprachigen Lyrik auf der Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert vor. In einem breiten Spektrum an Beiträgen international renommierter Experten aus Deutschland, Großbritannien, den USA, Kanada, Italien und den Niederlanden präsentiert diese Untersuchung ausführliche Analysen zu bekannten Größen (wie Volker Braun, Ulrike Draesner, Durs Grünbein, Ernst Jandl, Barbara Köhler, Friederike Mayröcker, Brigitte Oleschinski und Raoul Schrott), eingehende Betrachtungen zur Lyrik des Körpers, zur Verwendung von Klischee-Bildern, zum Topos der Kindheit oder zur 'neuen Schlichtheit', sowie Beiträge zur jüngsten Generati...
Transformation and Education in the Literature of the GDR
This book explores how writers adhered to, played with, and subverted the formulaic precepts of educational transformation in the German Democratic Republic.
Classical Music in the German Democratic Republic
Approaches the topic of classical music in the GDR from an interdisciplinary perspective, questioning the assumption that classical music functioned purely as an ideological support for the state.
Border Crossings
This volume assesses the importance of border crossings in the evolution of European culture and identity, as reflected in the work of modern European writers and film-makers. Contributors chart the processes of transition from stability to change, from the known to the culturally unsettled, treating the themes of migration, exile, allegiance and belonging, journey, marginality, the legacy of war and displacement, memory and the denial of memory. What emerges is a cross-disciplinary reappraisal of the concept of identity, in which fixity is replaced by movement, and in which the dynamic process of story-telling, with its narratives of migration, exile, and borders crossed, mirrors the shifting and nomadic pluralities of modern existence.
Beyond Style and Genre
Popular culture today manifests itself in a dense network of styles and genres, while the aesthetic preferences of the audience are highly differentiated. Besides, popular culture also implies a diversity of aesthetic strategies, discourses and value systems that traverse the symbolic demarcations between styles and genres and are effective across different artistic fields and individual media. Aesthetic concepts such as camp, retro or trash are expressions of a transgressive mode of production that facilitates a multitude of cross-connections between aesthetic spaces of experience. The volume brings together authors from different disciplines who approach aesthetic concepts in popular culture on a historical, theoretical and methodological level, analyze them on the basis of various aesthetic phenomena, or discuss aspects relevant to their theoretical contextualization, such as the emergence and establishment of artistic practices and aesthetic value systems.
